Rybin, Y. Luftwaffe ace Walter Schuck researched / Christer Bergstrom, Yuriy Rybin. - Sweden : [s. l.], 2019. - 190 p. : ill.

WALTER SCHUCK Oberleutnants Schuck and Triibsbach at 3./JG 7. Oberleutnants Triibsbach and Schuck at 3./JG 7. Several Me 262 pilots were vectored towards the wrong direction, and Schuck was among those. Only nineteen Me 262s made contact with the enemy. No more than five bombers and four escort fighters were shot down. Two of the latter were claimed by Major Rudorffer. It was a dismal Good Friday. The main target was Hamburg, which had been almost totally eradicated through RAF Bomber Command’s so-called “Operation Gomorrah” in July 1943. After being erroneously vectored towards the south, over the Lttneburger Heide, Schuck turned back towards Hamburg. By the time he arrived there, the bombers had already disappeared. But what Walter Schuck saw when he arrived over Hamburg, hit him like a strike in his belly. All those years, Schuck and the other Eis- meerjager had been living in perfect isolation in the Far North. They knew that Germany’s cities were bombed, but their apprehension of the bombings were only vague. Not even in his worst nightmares could Schuck have imagined the horrendous sight which met him when he flew above Hamburg: A whole city, a city of one million, turned into a landscape of black ruins. The whole area beneath Schuck’s Me 262 was one huge field of devasta­ tion, telling of death and horror. It was too much even to the battle-hardened veteran Schuck. As he sat there in the cockpit of the jet fighter, fifteen thousand feet above the ruined city landscape, he broke down in tears. He wept like a child. And he felt what he had never before felt during the war - an intense, glowing hatred against the perpetrators of this vast destruction of a city! When Schuck returned to Kaltenkirchen and low­ ered the landing gear of his Me 262, the nose wheel failed to lock in position. The plane took ground on the wing wheels, but the nose wheel swung to and fro. Schuck had to maintain the plane with the nose pointing upward while taxing in, but that caused the back side of the jet engines to graze the concrete runway, causing a cas­ cade of sparks. The sparks ignited the jet engines’ gas­ oline-powered start engines, and large flames erupted. Schuck broke the aircraft as quickly as possible, and jumped out and ran for his life. In that moment someone cried: “Tiefflieger! - Strafing fighters!” In the corner of his eye, Schuck could see a cou­ ple of single-engined fighter planes. He hurled himself into the closest one-man pit, which proved to be filled with chest-deep water. Luckily, the enemy fighters did not come down for a strafing pass against the airfield. Kaltenkirchen’s effective AAA screen discouraged the American pilots. However, just prior to Schuck’s land­ ing, a group of Mustangs had performed a surprise attack against the airfield, killing two men and damag­ ing three Me 262s on the runway. Before that, two Me 262s had been jumped by Mustangs shortly after take off from Kaltenkirchen, and Leutnant Erich Schulte was